Dynamic content

Normally the texts and pictures in BluffTitler are static: they never change when playing the animation. However, by using special formatting you can make them dynamic. With dynamic content you can automate tedious editing work, turn BluffTitler into an RSS news feed reader, a photo browser or even create internet controlled digital signage players and interactive apps.

For coders only

This page is only meant for software engineers. You do not have to understand anything on this page in order to change the texts and pictures of a BluffTitler template. Click here to learn how to use templates

To explain how it all works, a practical example works best. Imagine an animation where you would like to introduce the members of a music group, one musician at a time. Creating the animation for the first musician is fun, but for all the others it is very boring: for each musician you have to create a new layer with the same keyframes, only at different positions and with different texts.

A better solution is to store all the texts in an XML file, like this:

Indices and offsets

You can instruct BluffTitler to display a specific index with the following syntax:

dir:X:\temp\salsa.jpg[3]

You can add an offset with the following syntax:

dir:X:\temp\salsa.jpg[-1]

Offsets are zero-based: 0 means the first item.

Ranges

You can instruct BluffTitler to display a specific range with the following syntax:

dir:X:\temp\salsa.jpg[2:5]

This selects item numbers 2,3,4 and 5. Indices are zero-based: 0 means the first item.

Character sets

BluffTitler ignores all encoding and character set information in the XML files.

Use the font dialog (menu item MEDIA > Change Font...) to set the character set. Most XML files use UTF-8, but Unicode (UTF-16, LITTLE-ENDIAN) is the best option when you are making the XML files yourself.

Clean URLs

A URL without a filename must end with a slash:

http://www.blufftitler.com/

Examples

You can find some dynamic content examples in the Media\Shows\DynamicContent folder.

Generate show files

BluffTitler show files are simple text files. This makes it easy to generate them. With this method you can make any aspect of the show dynamic. Choose the Version tab of the <Control><F1> dialog for a description of the file format codes.

Below you can find an example of a PHP script that generates a BluffTitler show file. You can set the rotation speed with a HTML form.